/p.tt/

Facebook is telling lies about pages I like.   They just sent an email associating my name with a list of right wing pages I’ve never visited let alone liked.

I have more than one Facebook account.   One is my primary, personal, account, the one I chat with my friends on, share memes etc. The other account is my work account, I use it to manage the company Facebook page and apps. I do this because it’s a really, really, bad idea from a security standpoint  to mix personal accounts with business. To keep things easy we’ll call them “Social John” and “Work John“.

Not much happens with the Work John account, I’m not the primary admin of our pages so I don’t use it much. Because of this Facebook keeps sending the Work John email trying to entice him to use the service more.

Today a very weird email arrived from Facebook for Work John

Superficially it is suggesting to Work John that his friend Social John likes pages and so should Work John. I’ve got all the “dont use me for ads” setting locked down so this came as a bit of a surprise. However on reflection telling people their friends like things is reasonable, I suppose.

What’s not reasonable is the list of pages right under my name. Anybody who reads my feed know I’m on the liberal end of the political spectrum, I was after all part of Howard Dean’s national campaign staff in his presidential bid. So why is Facebook associating my name with the NRA, Mr Conservative and a right wing blogger I’d never heard of?

I re-checked and I haven’t accidentally ”liked” any of them. I don’t browse the web logged into the Work John account, it only has one “friend” and that’s Social John.

This is very disturbing on a lot of levels, facebook misrepresenting my political views is a big deal to me.  Implying I like Caddyshack is borderline defamatory.   As far as I can tell there is no way to stop Facebook doing this, they just lie about you behind your back and you never find out.

Do you know what Facebook is saying about you behind your back?

Hello and welcome to the latest version of my ongoing battle with running a regular blog.   My intent is to post a little more regularly than I have in the past and to post on subjects that focus mostly on technology, publishing and civil liberties.

The name /p.tt/ is a regular expression that matches my last name, for those who care about such things dot tt is the country code top level domain (cctld) for Trinidad and Tobago. If you want to reach me by email you can simply use my first initial as the user part and p.tt as the domain. This is the shortest legal email address you can have (it also breaks more than a few badly designed sites that made bad assumptions regarding email address formats).